Rain in local forecast; all-time global heat records challenged

Wednesday

As usual, most of the heaviest rain is forecast for the interior and West Coast. (Credit: NWS-Miami)

Rain chances today in Palm Beach were kicked up to 60 percent by the National Weather Service in Miami. Will coastal areas finally get a break from the dry weather pattern?

Palm Beach International Airport posted another set of goose eggs on Thursday as the official rainfall deficit for July nears 3 inches. No rain fell in Palm Beach.

Most of the Southeastern Florida coast was dry, while about a half-inch to an inch fell around Lake Okeechobee, according to South Florida Water Management District estimates.

Any rain that does materialize today and Saturday will sweep across the coast from the Atlantic. Friday morning radar, however, showed most of the convection occurring east of the Keys.

Rain chances Saturday fall to 40 percent and 30 percent on Sunday.

GLOBAL HEATWAVE: The July heatwave in South Florida has been relentless, with high temperatures at Palm Beach International Airport ranging from 91-95 every day this month.

Thursday’s low was only 83 degrees at PBIA, which tied the record warm minimum for the date last set in 2010. (Melbourne set a new record warm low with 92, beating the previous mark of 81 set in 2010. The low was 84 in Palm Beach.)

But this weather would represent a refreshing break for the Middle East, where an all-time record for hottest temperature on Earth — outside of Death Valley in California — was reached on Thursday.

The thermometer soared to 129.2 degrees at Mitribah, Kuwait, according to Weather Underground. Temperatures were as high as 128 degrees in parts of Iraq.

The hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet remains the 134.1 degrees in Death Valley on July 10, 1913, but the validity of that measurement has been questioned in recent years. Furnace Creek in Death Valley also recorded a high of 129.2 degrees on July 1, 2013.

The heatwave in the U.S. Midwest is forecast to continue through the weekend, with heat index values of up to 110 degrees in places like Chicago and St. Louis. Excessive Heat warnings for today cover all or parts of eight states, with Heat Advisories for 10 more.

The heat is expected to spread eastward over the weekend. Forecast highs in Philadelphia range from the mid- to upper 90s. Highs in New York should be in the mid-90s, with upper 90s in Washington.

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NEW LOOK AT A HOT TOPIC: Historical temperature records are skewed "toward the cool side," NASA reported in a study announced Thursday. Researchers argued that a fifth of all data that supports global warming over the last 150 years has been missed.

"The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of Earth, but there are fewer historic temperature readings from there than from lower latitudes because it is so inaccessible," the agency said. "A data set with fewer Arctic temperature measurements naturally shows less warming than a climate model that fully represents the Arctic."

This issue and other "quirks" have hidden about 19 percent of global air temperature warming since the 1860s, NASA researchers said in the study published in the Journal Nature Climate Change.